Comment by nona | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nona | Hacker News Reader

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While I was originally interested in the promise of bitcoin as a means of exchanging money bypassing banks, these days I'm wondering if complete secrecy is still a good idea.

Are taxes – any taxation at all – a good idea? I would say yes – funding common infrastructure and services as charities or private companies seems doomed to fail. Making all financial transactions secret would make tax evasion rampant.

What about money coming from criminal enterprises, ie. money laundering. What about extreme concentration of money, having an outsized and untraceable influence on our political system and increasing regulatory capture to the extreme.

I'm not against disruption of our financial system in principle, but it seems we'll first need to also come up with good answers on how we organize society. A society of working poor, with a small but extremely wealthy elite doesn't seem like a good deal – even for the extremely wealthy.

You don't need to implement a sales or income tax in order to subsidize the government's operations. One proposal by "single tax" based on property tax, proposed by a certain Henry George has interesting merits. One such merit is that it is pretty hard to hide from a property tax.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

I think that in this century we've become accustomed to the existing credit card payment systems that have access to all of our payment data and are allowed to do with it what they wish (and by extension, the government also can subpoena our payment data in investigations). But if you look back in history this is a pretty new idea. Giving the government access to every single payment you make is pretty dangerous if you have a change of regime into something more authoritarian like in the case of China.

I think that if cryptocurrency can provide about the same level of fungibility and privacy as ordinary cash, that would be fine. You can track marked bills with some level of effort (kind of analogous to an EAE attack in the cryptocurrency world) but the general principle is that not every transaction is automatically logged in some easily inspectable database and sold to the highest bidder.

We had currency secrecy in the past with physical cash. It is probably inevitable with currency secrecy that you get something like the mafia.

At least physical cash though put a constraint on the scale of the mafia.

A global, secret, digital currency will inevitably lead to organized crime on the scale of the currency. It is just an absolutely terrible idea.

The appeal is in the abstract because it is easy to ignore the downside risks in the abstract.

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